You go to LA for a couple days and this is the type of news that gets dropped on you. Tom Crean’s contract was believed to for 8 years at an average of $2.3 million per, or about $18 million. In actuality, it appears Crean’s contract will include two more years, and the total value of which will be close to $23 million. So it appears that Crean has gotten a $4.5 million contract extension before he’s coached his first game.
Technically, Crean is not getting an extension. It appears he’s simply negotiated more years, up to now over what he had at Marquette, which was a 10 year contract he signed in 2006 which ran through the 2016-2017 season. This means Crean should be “locked up” (at least as locked up as college coaches can be) through 2017-2018. It also hopefully means that IU is avoiding the odd situation that occured in Lexington this year where Billy Gillispie operated without a finalized contract for a whole season, and still has not signed a formal deal with the University of Kentucky.
For better or worse, IU appears to be committing to Crean and hopefully Crean to IU. In reality though, this neither locks IU or Crean together any longer as long as the buyouts do not change. It will still cost IU $3 million to fire Crean before the final year of the contract, and Crean’s buyout to leave IU will likely decrease from $3 million to $1 million over the life of the contract, just like it did in the MOU (pdf).
The better message that’s being sent though is that stability is key for IU Basketball. While IU fans ask for stability and healing and reconcilation, they rarely want to offer up the money and security to a coach to allow him to do those things. Here, Crean has a certain level of stability to build the program slowly, carefully, and by making all the proper steps, not shortcuts. While I disagree with people who see the program as being light years away from where Sampson, Davis, or Knight in his last years had it, it will still take Crean a while to get to where IU Basketball is “supposed” to be: regularly competing for national titles. Even entertaining the fiction that Crean is “locked up” for 10 years is a big step toward getting to that level.
Finally, it’s not hard to see how this might have happened. While Tom Crean certainly had a lot of security before, a lot of that security disappeared when Rick Greenspan announced he was leaving at the end of the year. Crean will not be coaching for the AD that hired him, not to mention an AD who had to have this hire work in order to keep the job. If Crean wasn’t up to snuff in any way, Greenspan certainly would not have survived. Now that arguably Crean’s biggest backer is gone, it may have been important for him to get whatever extra security he could.
The IU Twilight Zone, part II
Consider if you will for a moment the possibility that DJ White never broke his foot. Entertain the idea that the Marco Killingsworth/DJ White frontcourt pairing came to fruition. Envision if you will a reality where Mike Davis’ help arrived and worked. What would have happened?
Obviously IU would have been more successful during the 2005-2006 season. The pairing of DJ and Marco would have been one of the best frontcourts in the country. Both had the ability to pound you down low and step out and hurt you. By the end of the season, IU also have a nice little rotation at the three, Marshall Strickland was solid at the two, and Earl Calloway had emerged as the starting point guard.
DJ would have erased many of Marco’s shortcomings. His pre-injury athleticism would have made up for Marco’s inability to get off the ground. He would have protected the rim better and caused the man Marco was guarding to have another defender to think about when DJ came from the help side. Simply put, the team would have been better.
But how much better? In the few games they played together, DJ and Marco never looked in sync. At some point you simply have too much firepower in a certain area and they get in each other’s way. How much of that was the lack of practice and time together and how much was simply never going to be overcome? My guess is a significant amount would be overcome but there would be a bit of frustration.
So what would the result have been? You would have to believe IU would have won the Duke showdown. I would believe IU would have won the game at Indiana State. Maybe IU still loses most of the Big Ten road games they lost, but they likely beat Iowa at home and possibly UConn and maybe even Penn State, whipping out most of the devastating five game losing streak that prompted Davis’ resignation. IU also probably advances in the Big Ten Tournament to the final against Iowa. That probably gives IU a higher seed, they avoid Gonzaga who was within seconds of making the Elite Eight, and probably go to at least the Sweet 16.
The larger question is whether this would have been enough to save Davis’ job. There were a lot of fans who were of the opinion that Davis had to go, no matter what the level of success was. Now, considering that Davis did not have enough success in the won/loss column, it’s hard to take IU fans at their word that they do not care how much Davis won if they had to watch his offense. When fans though are saying that a national championship is not enough to earn a contract extension, that says a lot.
I guess the biggest issue would be if Davis had made the Final Four. That would have made the expectations of the Davis era very clear. Mediocre seasons until Davis hit a good recruiting class, which would build up into a great team. He would never get more than you thought out of his talent, but when he occasionally got the talent, he would succeed. I don’t think it would have. My feeling is that if DJ hadn’t gotten hurt, anything short of a national title in 2006 would not be enough to keep Davis employed at IU to this day.